You are a well-paid sous-chef. You and your friends, also sous-chefs, have all decided to climb a very tall building for no apparent reason.

You are opposed by Devil Bunny, who needs a ham, and believes that making you fall from the building is the best way to get one.

DBNAH is essentially a race game (a'la Chutes and Ladders) with a few strategy-inducing twists. This game's main feature is the feeling that the designer had snorted a line of cleanser before sitting down to make it.

Each player has 2 or 3 sous-chefs under their control. Your ability to move is randomized by rolling 2 or 3 dice depending upon the number of players in the game. Dice are allocated in their entirety to one piece (that is, their value cannot be split); one die equates to one move. Moves can be made which are less than the die the move is associated with, but any one move must be in a straight line, meaning no "faking" vertical movement by alternating diagonal moves.

So far, sounds pretty boring. Which is where Devil Bunny comes in. Every time a 6 appears on a die (50% chance when rolling 2 dice, 33.3% chance when 3), the villainoushare brutally attacks the highest sous-chef on the board (think Monty Python and the Holy Grail), knocking him from his position, causing him to fall. Once a character falls, she drops onto the next piece beneath her, and that player gets the choice of placing them where they would like beneath their piece, or passing them on to another player's piece. If there is no one to catch a fallen piece, that piece hits the ground. If a piece falls from a certain height, the piece is dead. Finally, the satanic rabbit takes the place of the last piece knocked off, making the board increasingly cramped.

The goal of the game is to have the most sous-chefs achieve the building's peak the fastest. The trappings of all of this are arbitrarily numbered victory spots, which the sous-chefs grab and earn the corresponding number of points. The first one there gets the highest value, and it goes down from there. And above all, the diabolicalpseudo-rodentMUST NOT GET A HAM, which, thankfully, is impossible.

The gameplay which results from all this is undeniably interesting. All the players tend to move in one large clump, since if any one piece tries to move too far ahead, the Devil Bunny will certainly knock him back down. Also, players are dependent upon each other (or, at least, their own pieces) to catch them if they fall. Finally, the tight board and movement rules make it difficult to travel upwards, not to mention the inevitable board clogging which occurs.

In the end game, when players leave the board and fill in the top, the remaining pieces are suddenly in danger; there are no pieces to catch them if they fall! In fact, in one game I played, there were 10 sous-chefs in the beginning, and only two made it to the top; the other 8 died not-so-tragic, meaningless, though humorous, deaths.

Mostly, deciding how to move is fairly limited, the only choices being playing it safe at the back of the pack (likely to lose), playing it safe at the front of the pack (you'll be lucky to win), and not playing it safe and trying to break off from the group (difficult to pull off, since you have to move in a group, lest fall back to the main, and also doing so allows everyone to catch up fast.) Strategy basically consists of optimizing your moves and deciding when to play your odds. In a game with 5 players, in 3 rounds the devil bunny has a chance probability of coming up 5 times. That's quite a bit.

Ernest is emphasizing simplicity, and how making a small amount of novel and clever rules, an extremely satisfying game can result.